Bella Boo @ Lux Frágil (09/02/24)
In an attempt to make the most of my last weekend in Lisbon before going on the road again, I hatched a plan to go to three parties last night. First, at midnight I would head to Outra Cena aka the OC to see Hiroma Keo doing the warm-up on This Side, the tall room with the giant moon-shaped light fitting that I’ve described before. Then, around 2.30am, I would head to Lux to see Bella Boo, who it turns out was scheduled to play the disco only two weeks after I came across her RA mix from 2022 (I wrote about that here). That is the kind of coincidence you shouldn’t ignore and I was determined to check her out. Then I was going to see if my legs would take me to Planeta Manas for Shcuro and Photonz’s party No UFOs, as far as I can tell the only regular electro night that’s ever existed in Lisbon and this weekend featuring Jensen Interceptor. JI played at one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in Lisbon, called Periferia, which took place in the old Nada Temple before the pandemic, and I was keen to check out what he’s doing five years later.
Of course this plan was ambitious. If something had to give, it was probably No UFOs, though I did also entertain the idea of just skipping Lux and going straight from the OC to Manas. Lux is always a bit of a palaver and you can never quite predict how challenging the crowd is going to be. Will there be so many people you can’t move your arms for fear of elbowing someone? Will there be enough fabulous gays front-right to protect you from all the drunk straights? Will João Botelho be there, flailing around like a madman in front of the speakers? Well, that last part at least is something you can rely on. Luckily for me I don’t have to worry too much about the door, though that doesn’t stop me from always being nervous as I approach the imposing building. I will also admit to being a bit nervous about what Bella Boo was going to play — as I said in my write-up of her RA mix, I felt a really strong affinity with the first half of the selection and the way she put it together, but was less into the more obvious bigger-room stuff in the second half. What if she leaned into that latter sound at the expense of a more nuanced and interesting vibe?
I napped from 7pm to 10pm and successfully woke up as planned (unlike last time), made some spaghetti and got ready to go out. Outra Cena is in a bit of an awkward place to get to from my house and Lisbon’s night bus services are notoriously unforgiving, so it took me longer than I expected to arrive. When I did, around half past midnight, there was no queue and very few people in the club. Amaury’s room was empty, so I enjoyed myself immensely for about half an hour absorbing the great tunes he was playing in blissful solitude. Like when I played a few weeks ago, the lighting tech had pumped the room so full of fog that it was barely possible to see anyone else anyway, though sadly I was to discover that even if you can’t see other people, you can still hear them. Groups of people kept stumbling through the fog (understandably) and shouting/shrieking between me and the speakers (much less understandably). A girl kept taking her phone out to text a friend, possibly the most distracting thing you can do in a dark, foggy room. I asked her to stop and 15 seconds later she was doing it again. I asked her again more forcibly and she got super offended and stormed out. Result.
Amaury was alternating between broken, bassy fare and wicked 4/4 and I was having fun hearing the slightly chaotic edge of the music in the empty room. At no point did enough people come in to properly absorb the reverberations, but they have tuned and treated the system and room just enough that this never causes too much of a problem. What did cause a problem, though, was a group of four people who installed themselves right in front of the DJ cage and started chatting…and chatting…and chatting. This annoyed me for two reasons: 1) it was very loud and distracting; and 2) it interfered with the tableau that the fog and lights in that room create out of the DJ space, the red and blue lights failing to penetrate the booth enough to illuminate the whole DJ, leaving only their hands visible, flashing above the mixer. It’s a wonderfully anonymising effect, which was ruined by these people’s presence. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell them to shut up.
I skipped from Outra Cena at around 2am as planned, to catch the bus down to Lux in time for Bella Boo. My fears about how she might play were unfounded: what I liked most about her set, or at least for most of it, was how understated it was. As I arrived she was playing a groovy, bongo-heavy track at a moderate pace and not too loud (the sound tech turned it up almost immediately, which worried me, but it was still in good range) and the room was full enough to feel energy, but nowhere near packed. I am fully aware I sound like an old person saying this, but it was very refreshing to walk into a club and not be immediately bashed around the head with peaktime energy. Bella’s selections in her first hour or so patiently built on that rhythmic and tonal foundation, often probing into more conventionally ‘peak’ ideas but always seeming to say: “it’s coming, but we’re not there quite yet”. Basically, she was really DJing, in the sense that she was communicating something through both the selections and the craft with which she strung them together. Simple, you might say, but how many times do you go out and really hear someone doing that rather than just playing one thing after another?
What made me admire it even more was that I often didn’t particularly like the individual tracks she was playing. For example, not long after I arrived she played a basic minimal tech house version of ‘Plastic Dreams’. I’d never heard it before, and my gut reaction as soon as I clocked that famous motif was “who asked for this?” NO ONE, was the answer. And yet…in the context of what she’d been playing before, and in the arc of where she was taking us, it actually made sense, much more than the original would have. If anything, I envied her confidence in playing it, and started to imagine scenarios where I would play it too. And it sounded fucking great on Lux’s sound system. (On this topic, there is no point really comparing Lux and the OC: their sound systems are both good, but doing completely different things.)
Me, enjoying a basic bro remake of ‘Plastic Dreams’? That’s how I knew Bella had somehow got me — and then she mixed out of it into Terry Francis’s ‘Hannah’s Dub’. I spent the first two minutes of the track smiling and dancing, thinking to myself “oh it’s ‘Hannah’s Dub’, I love this tune!” But the dreamy part of the track as I know it never dropped, and I could hear other odd noises in it that I couldn’t recall from the record. Was I hearing things? Had she made an edit? I’ve had the 12” on my shelf ever since I first got hooked on Andrew Weatherall’s Blood Sugar mixes almost 15 years ago, and finally I managed to remember that it has two versions of the track on it, and I realised Bella must be playing the other one, the one I’ve literally never paid attention to because ‘Hannah’s Dub’ is so great. In my opinion ‘Hannah’s House’ is the much less interesting take on the tune, yet once again it made more sense in the context of her set, and hearing it gave me a pleasurable if unexpected few minutes of head-scratching discovery. Again, how often does that happen on a night out?
As she continued she gave us more classic references, from that track with the “el sonido del ritmo” vocal to a version of Clivillés & Cole’s ‘A Deeper Love’ (for me, a call-back to seeing Kleo play this on Christmas at Pbar), a housed-up take on ‘Doctor Love’ that wasn’t any of the ones I already know, and at least one “what happened to the music” vocal — definitely a yellow card offence in my book. The central thread to it all was stripped-down rolling housey grooves and BONGOS, and Bella’s mixing was deft and musical like in the RA mix. Nothing stood out particularly, but everything just flowed right. It was greater than the sum of its parts. I found myself wishing I had it in me to DJ like that.
Those of you who’ve reached this far are probably asking yourselves: “just how high were you last night, Joe?” Well, the answer is: not at all! Psyche! But that turned out to be my downfall. I was just reaching that phase of the night where I started to feel a bit lethargic, and I knew I needed waking up. As I’ve mentioned previously, there’s only so far that appreciation for restraint and discipline in a DJ set will take you before you need a bit of a slap around the face. Bella had been bringing the energy up gradually and the crowd was very much into it, but every time it felt like she was pushing into ‘slap’ territory, either she would retreat a little again, or it wouldn’t quite be the slap I wanted. As an example, she played many tracks that had a UK funky-esque feel to them, with broken syncopation in a house template, but at no point did she play any out-and-out UK funky bangers. Equally, in the 45 minutes or so before I called it a night, she dropped some gnarlier drum trax that made me think of Dance Mania — but none of them had the pure grit of a truly gnarly Dance Mania tune. They were just a bit too clean.
Two highlights from the last stretch were a track with a vocal about being a “hot mess”, which I’ve worked out is the latest REKIDS release ‘Hot Mess’ by Hilit Kolet — another one I’m on the fence about today listening at home, but which worked magic last night — and Midland’s ‘You Never Take Me Dancing’, which sounded absolutely epic over the Lux system. Check out the charming new video for the tune below:
I left around 4.10am, twenty minutes before Bella was due to finish, satisfied but also sad I couldn’t quite make it to the end. Lisbon’s night bus schedule is a nightmare and I didn’t want to get a taxi home. And as you can tell, I had given up on the idea of making it out to Manas — Jensen Interceptor was on until 5.30am, but while that would surely have been the slap I needed to last another hour or two, in the absence of inter-club teleportation it just wasn’t going to happen.
One final note on the crowd in Lux. It was clearly a quiet night at the club, but for me that made all the difference. Provided with enough space to dance, the people in the disco last night opted to really use it, and it was the first time in a while that I’ve really enjoyed moving about in that space, interacting with people around me and throwing some shapes. There was no noticeable aggro. (Though there was, unfortunately, a party in fancy dress, including a woman with ‘Red Indian’ headgear on. Welcome to Portugal in 2024.) It was a sharp contrast to my visit there to see Cinthie in late 2022, when there was no space to dance and I ended up falling into a drain in the car park on my way home. Thankfully this time I got the night bus on time and was in bed by 5am. Two out of three clubs in one night isn’t a bad hit rate, and now I know to make the effort to see Bella Boo again, the next time the opportunity arises.